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At the beach, he issued orders quickly.
"We can't hand-carry him all the way to the hospital. A
With the women gone, Seever turned back to his patient. They had carried him into the shade, and it was now obvious even without a thermometer that he had a high fever. His face was flushed, and he was perspiring heavily. Seever was somewhat relieved by the latter fact, but be removed his own shirt and Bob's, soaked them in the sea, and spread one over the younger man's chest He improvised a turban with the other.
It was almost sunset when a jeep appeared at high speed. Arthur Ki
"Your wife wasn't home. I've told him everything," Maeta said before Seever could ask a question.
"All right. Arthur, get us to my place as quickly as you can. I'll use the back seat, with Bob. Daph, crowd in front with Mae until we get to your house; you can get off there."
"No! I'm staying with you. Bob's sick!"
Seever was too busy even to shrug, much less argue. Maeta had shifted to the front seat and taken the child on her lap, and seconds later they were speeding back down the road. Bob's father said nothing as they approached his house, and did not slow down; the child was still with them as they approached the hospital. She tried to help carry Bob into the building; then Maeta took her out. Arthur Ki
The trouble was plain enough now. Bob's temperature was indeed high, and the broken left arm was showing the red streaks which indicated massive in fection. Seever removed the cast to reveal a red and black mess underneath.
"Antibiotics?" asked Ki
"Maybe. They don't work on everything, in spite of people's calling them 'miracle drugs'-they were doing that with the sulfa compounds a few years ago, too. I'll do the best I can, but he may not be able to keep the arm."
"This is a fine time for the Hunter to be out of action."
"Probably not coincidence," pointed out Seever. "If he were there, this wouldn't have happened at all. Look, I'll give the boy a shot of what seems best- I'll make some tests first-and then, if I can, I'll wait six hours before doing anything else. Of course, if things get obviously worse I won't be able to give all that time. Then well have to decide about the arm.
"And I'm going to do one more thing."
Ki
12. Joker
That was the situation when the Hunter woke up. It took him a little while to catch up with reality, though he knew well enough what had happened at the ship. It had obviously been found by the search expedition, identified, as being the onestolen by the Hunter's quarry, and booby-trapped against the possible return of that individual. The alien recalled Seever's question about standard police procedures, and would have blushed had he been equipped for it.
He was perfectly familiar with the immobilizing agent which had been used, and if he had been properly alert would never have been trapped by it.
He became aware of the basin which held him, and of his host's hand immersed in his substance. That was presumably what had allowed him to wake up. The agent itself would have held him for months; but he had absorbed an equilibrium amount of it while separate from his host's body; and his own four pounds of tissue would have been saturated by a very small total quantity of the substance. Since it was designed to be absorbed rapidly by tissues similar to those of the Hunter's usual host species, which were biochemically fairly similar to those of humanity, and since Bob massed thirty-five or forty times as much as his symbiont, enough had now diffused into Bob's body to clear the Hunter's nearly completely. Returning to Bob seemed safe enough, since the concentration of the substance would be so much smaller.
Without bothering to check on his surroundings by forming an eye, the Hunter began to soak his way into the hand and spread through his host's body in normal fashion. He had completed about a quarter of the job when he heard Arthur Ki
"Ben, Look! The level is going down in the Hunter's dish, and he's higher around Bob's wrist than before! He must be awake!"
The alien extended a finger-sized pseudopod from the basin and waved it to let the speaker know he had been heard. The doctor's voice promptly responded.
"Hunter, get in there and get to work! Bob has picked up a very bad infection that my drugs don't seem to be touching, and he needs you. We'll ask you what happened later; first things first."
The Hunter waved again in acknowledgment. He was already aware of the trouble, and was working on it.
It was real work. Destroying the infecting organisms was a minor task, finished in minutes; but the toxins they had produced were far more difficult to neutral ize, and much of the tissue in the arm where they had entered was totally destroyed. The fracture had not been responsible; neither the Hunter nor Seever had made any professional errors there. A tiny wooden splinter had gotten into Bob's left hand just beyond the end of the cast. It had clearly entered after the Hunter's departure; Bob himself might not have noticed it, but the alien could not possibly have failed to. With his personal resistance to infection long since destroyed and his symbiont absent, Bob was a walking culture tube; a few hours had nearly destroyed his arm. The Hunter had not realized that his host's general self-reparability had become so poor, but the facts seemed beyond dispute. It was not the first time he wished he had studied biochemistry more thoroughly on his home world. He trusted contact with the check team could be made soon; they would certainly have specialists in tins field among their numbers.
But he had to get back to work. He could clean up the ruined arm and expect it to be replaced, however slowly, by normal healing. The real worry was Bob's brain. Some of the bacteria as well as their toxins must have been carried to that organ by his circulatory sys tem, and it could not be taken for granted that nothing had left the blood vessels to lodge in nerve tissue.
The Hunter had always been afraid to intrude into this material himself, though he had maintained a network of his own tissue in the capillaries. Brain cells were the objects where he was most afraid of making a mistake based on differences between human biochemistry and what he was more used to. Now it was necessary to take the chance, and he took it; but he worked very, veryslowly and very, very carefully.
The situation was one he had never been able to explain at all clearly either to his host or to Seever who had been curious about it. The Hunter did possess the ability to sense directly structures down to the large-molecule level. At the same time he could be aware simultaneously of the trillions of cells in a living organism, and work on them all at once with the same attention to each that a jeweler could give to a single watch. When he tried to describe this to a human being, however, it seemed to involve a contrast for his listener; the human seemed to think of him as a whole race of beings instead of an individual. This tended to bother the Hunter, because be could only think of himself as an individual.